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Pessimists are the people who have no hope for themselves or for others. Pessimists are also people who think the human race is beneath their notice, that they're better than other human beings.

James A. Baldwin

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More quotes by James A. Baldwin

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It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate.
James A. Baldwin
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A devotion to humanity is... too easily equated with a devotion to a Cause, and Causes, as we know, are notoriously bloodthirsty.
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James Joyce is right about history being a nightmare-- but it may be that nightmare from which no one can awaken. People are trapped in history and history in trapped in them.
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Great art can only be created out of love.
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It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless.
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You think your pains and heartbreaks are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. [and then you discover that others have suffered much more than you and your problems look good in comparison]
James A. Baldwin
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The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.
James A. Baldwin
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The states of birth, suffering, love, and death, are extreme states: extreme, universal, and inescapable. We all know this, but we would rather not know it. The artist is present to correct the delusions to which we are all prey in our attempts to avoid this knowledge. - James Baldwin, The Creative Process
James A. Baldwin
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I began plotting novels at about the time I learned to read. The story of my childhood is the usual bleak fantasy, and we can dismiss it with the restrained observation that I certainly would not consider living it again.
James A. Baldwin
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People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted.
James A. Baldwin
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There are few things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people.
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Society is held together by our need we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that without it we will be hurled into that void, within which, like the earth before the Word was spoken, the foundations of society are hidden.
James A. Baldwin
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It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.
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A real writer is always shifting and changing and searching.
James A. Baldwin
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We are responsible for the world in which we find ourselves, if only because we are the only sentient force which can change it.
James A. Baldwin
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We do not trust educated people and rarely, alas, produce them, for we do not trust the independence of mind which alone makes a genuine education possible.
James A. Baldwin
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All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.
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I think Americans are terrified of feeling anything. I never met a people more infantile in my life.
James A. Baldwin
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Women manage, quite brilliantly, on the whole, and to stunning and unforeseeable effect, to survive and surmount being defined by others. They dismiss the definition, however dangerous or wounding it may be-- or even, sometimes, find a way to utilize it.
James A. Baldwin
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Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word love here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.
James A. Baldwin